Wang Ma stood watching, then she felt the teapot and found it hot. She filled the bowl from which Ezra had drunk, and taking it in both hands she went and sat down on the high doorsill. There, warmed by the hot sun, she continued to sit, drinking the tea slowly and gazing reflectively into the sunlit court.
II
PEONY FACED DAVID. “YOU!” she cried with soft ferocity. “Not to tell me!” He was fleeter of foot than she, and wile had to get her first to the gate. Once he had looked back and had seen her, and instantly she seemed to give up the chase and had slipped into a side alley of the immense compound. He looked behind him again, and not seeing her, he had smiled triumphantly and had slowed his steps. Then suddenly she was ahead of him in a passageway, and he knew he was outwitted. She stood, her hands outspread to catch him and hold him. He stopped just short of her, folded his arms, and looked down into her reproachful eyes.
“I am not bound to you!” he declared.
Her small lovely face quivered, flushed, and wilted before his gaze like a smitten flower. “No,” she said in a little voice. “It is only I who am bound to you. And — and — you are quite right. You need not tell me — anything.”
He was instantly remorseful. “Now, Peony,” he argued. “I will tell you — but only if I am not forced.”
“It is wrong of me,” she agreed. “I will never do it again. See — you are free!”
She locked her hands behind her back. He put out his arms but she evaded them and stepped aside, and then turned and ran from him. Now it was he who pursued and she who fled … How she loved to run! It was her luck to be bondmaid in this house of foreigners. Had she been in a Chinese house her feet would have been bound small as soon as it was sure she was to be pretty, so that if a son of the house were to love her and want her for a concubine, she would not shame the family by having feet like a servant’s. She ran on, laughing at the sound of him running behind her. He was laughing, too, but they muted their laughter in the secret way of their childhood. He caught her, as he always did, as she knew he would, and she pushed him and twisted herself free — almost, but not quite. His arms were strong. Then her acute ear, quick to hear footsteps and voices, warned her that they were seen.
“Young Master,” she cried loudly. “You must not take your life!”
He dropped his arms, but it was too late. Madame Ezra had seen them.
“Peony!” she said sharply. “You forget yourself!”
“I was holding him lest he throw himself into the well,” she faltered.
“Nonsense!” Madame Ezra retorted. But she wavered. Did the girl lie or was she indeed holding him against death?
David laughed “She’s lying, Mother,” he said robustly. “We were only playing a game.”
Madame Ezra was not pleased. “It is time you stopped playing games with Peony,” she said coldly. She was less pleased than usual to see how beautiful her son looked at this moment. The high color and bold bearing in which she took her secret delight now alarmed her. And Peony, too, was growing dangerously pretty.
“Make yourself ready,” she said shortly to the girl. “You must accompany me to the house of the Rabbi. And you, David, should be at your books.”
She walked firmly down the passageway toward her own rooms. David made a grimace and shrugged his shoulders, and Peony answered with lifted eyebrows and a sigh. Then her little face took on its look of sweetest coaxing. She glanced at Madame Ezra’s back and lingered to put a small hand, flower light, upon David’s arm.
“You will tell me all about her?”
He smiled gloriously, and she smiled back, a tender smile, the same smile, or so it seemed, that he had seen so often upon her face when she looked up at him.
“Everything,” he promised.
They parted and Peony went to her room to prepare for the duty of going with Madame Ezra. It was a small room, set in a tiny court of its own, but opening into Wang Ma’s court, which in turn opened upon a dim mossy passage into Madame Ezra’s own rooms. This little room in which Peony lived had once belonged to a concubine, three generations back, a secret love, scarcely acknowledged, of Ezra’s own great-grandfather. Here, too, Wang Ma herself had lived before she was married to Old Wang by Ezra’s own father. The room had stood empty while Peony was a child, too young to be alone, but when she was fifteen it had been given her. It was a pretty little room, the walls whitewashed and the gray tiles of the floor scrubbed silvery clean. Upon the facing walls on either side of her bed Peony had hung two pairs of scrolls, pictured with the flowers of spring and summer, the bright leaves of autumn, and the snowy pines of winter. These she had painted herself. She had sat in the schoolroom with David and his tutor for many years, her duty to fetch them hot tea and to clean their brushes and grind ink, and she had learned to read and write. This learning, added to her own graceful talent, had made her able to turn a verse as well as David could himself. Thus on the scroll for spring she had written in two long lines of brushed tracery:
The peach flowers bloom upon the trees,
Not knowing whether the frosts will kill them.
Upon the mimosa branches of the summer scroll she wrote:
The hot sun burns, the thunder
drums across the sky.
The cicadas sing endlessly, unheeding.
Under the scarlet maple leaves she wrote:
The red leaves fall, and all the court is still.
I tread the leaves and under my feet they die.
Beneath the snow-covered pines she wrote two more lines:
Snow covers the living and the dead,
The green pine tree, the perished flowers.
These four poems she read very often, wondering how she could improve them. Whether she would ever be able to make them better she did not know. But at present they reached to the bottom of her heart and made her want to cry.
She moved now in haste to put on a plain dark coat and trousers, to take the peach blossoms from her hair, to put off her gold bracelets. She looked into the small old mirror of her dressing case and rubbed a little rice powder into her skin and touched her lips faintly with red cream. Her hair she made always in a long braid, as all bondmaids wore their hair, signifying that they were not daughters of the house, but at home she kept the braid twisted into a knot over her ear. Now she let it down and brushed the straight black fringe above her eyebrows.
This done, she made haste through the passageways until she came to Madame Ezra’s court. Wang Ma was putting the last touch upon Madame Ezra’s costume. It was rich and individual, and Madame Ezra thought it was entirely Jewish. She did not know that in the generations during which her family had lived in China touches of embroidery at sleeve and throat, folds in the skirt, the twist of buttons and braid, had crept into the costume of her grandmothers.
Peony paused at the door and gave a slight cough and prepared her smile. Madame Ezra did not turn. Usually she was voluble and kindly to her serving maids, but in the last few days, while her mind had been busy with the Passover and all her being was renewed in the faith of her ancestors, she had not been pleased with the intimacy she perceived between Peony and David. True, the girl had been bought as a companion as well as a servant for the solitary little boy he had been, but the years had passed too quickly. She reproached herself that she had not taken heed earlier that they were now grown, her son a man, and Peony a woman. She was inclined at this moment to feel aggrieved and to be harsh toward Peony, who should have understood the change by instinct.